[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Liquid war

[Bill Totten]

Welcome to Pipelineistan

by Pepe Escobar

Asia Times Online (March 26 2009)


What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will
provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new,
polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "global war on terror", which the
Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War", sports a far more
important, if half-hidden, twin - a global energy war. I like to think
of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that
crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put
another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian
Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it,
geographically, as Pipelineistan.

All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s,
I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri
cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline,
better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the
Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched
with acronyms, so get used to them!)

I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or
perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to
Istanbul, annotating my own do-it-yourself routes for LNG (liquefied
natural gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that
once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased
Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen", Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the
immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.

In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to
Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were puzzled
when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that country's oil
boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.") Entering the Space
Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy giant Gazprom's
headquarters in Moscow - which digitally details every single pipeline
in Eurasia - or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ
in Tehran, with its neat rows of female experts in full chador, was my
equivalent of entering Aladdin's cave. And never reading the words
"Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same sentence is still a source of
endless amusement for me.

Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap.
But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy
is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their hands on. So
consider this dispatch just the first installment in a long, long tale
of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the maddeningly
complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no matter what else
muscles into the headlines this week.

Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or
alive" bin Laden, the Taliban - neo, light or classic - or that "war on
terror", whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the
high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along
the pipelines of the planet.

Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?

Calling Dr Zbig In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew
Brzezinski - realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national
security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the US on
its modern energy wars - laid out in some detail just how to hang on to
American "global primacy". Later, his master plan would be duly copied
by that lethal bunch of Dr No's congregated at Bill Kristol's Project
for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the acronym
since its website and its followers went down).

For Dr Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia - from, that is,
thinking big - it all boils down to fostering the emergence of just the
right set of "strategically compatible partners" for Washington in
places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so politely put it
back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian
security system".

By now, Dr Zbig - among whose fans is evidently President Barack Obama -
must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver the
energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia, it
seems, begs to differ.

Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term
keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia.
Those who control Pipelineistan - and despite all the dreaming and
planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington - will
have the upper hand in whatever is to come, and there's not a terrorist
in the world, or even a "long war", that can change that.

Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying the key
vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over
Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and difficulty
of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully slow development
of energy alternatives". Though you may not have noticed, the first
skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and even in the
worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given the
relentless competition between the West and Asia, be it in the Middle
East, in the Caspian theater, or in African oil-rich states like Angola,
Nigeria and Sudan.

In these early skirmishes of the 21st century, China reacted swiftly
indeed. Even before the attacks of September 11 2001, its leaders were
formulating a response to what they saw as the reptilian encroachment of
the West on the oil and gas lands of Central Asia, especially in the
Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001, its leaders joined
with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's known
as the SCO and that's an acronym you should memorize. It's going to be
around for a while.

Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the Stans,
the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union - Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan - which the Bill Clinton
administration and then the new George W Bush administration, run by
those former energy men, had been eyeing covetously. The organization
was to be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation
society that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would
function as a kind of security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.

Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that
country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the New
Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign investment to
truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves - and thus sell much
more to the West than US-imposed sanctions now allow.

No wonder Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air
assault on that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted
Likudniks as well as former vice president Dick ("Angler") Cheney and
his neo-conservative chamberlains and comrades-in-arms. As seen by the
elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing and Moscow, such a US attack, now
likely off the radar screen until at least 2012, would be a war not only
against Russia and China, but against the whole project of Asian
integration that the SCO is coming to represent.

Global BRIC-a-brac

Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its Iranian,
Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to dream of a
secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk Road, extending
from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus Iran and Russia) to
Xinjiang province, its Far West.

The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India,
and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that
increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy
supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course, the
role the Washington ruling elite would like the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) to play across Eurasia. Given that Russia and China
expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia, clashes of various
sorts are inevitable.

Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in
Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a
historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations -
Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist - and, because of that,
capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in
Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the-Beltway
global strategists like Dr Zbig and president George H W Bush's national
security advisor Brent Scowcroft.

According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the 21st
century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle of BRIC
countries - for those of you by now collecting New Great Game acronyms,
that stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China - plus the future
Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Add in a unified
South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have a global
SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high-octane dream.

The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente cordiale.

Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively expand
into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for what it
was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil and natural gas
reserves of what Americans would soon be calling the "arc of
instability", a vast span of lands extending from North Africa to the
Chinese border.

No less important would be the routes pipelines would take in bringing
the energy buried in those lands to the West. Where they would be built,
the countries they would cross, would determine much in the world to
come. And this was where the empire of US military bases (think, for
instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met Pipelineistan (represented, way
back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).

AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an entity
registered in the US, is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka "the
Trans-Balkan", slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring Caspian oil
to the West without taking it through either Russia or Iran. As a
pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of creating a
US-controlled energy-security grid that was first developed by president
Bill Clinton's energy secretary Bill Richardson and later by Cheney.

Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an
energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia
through a series of now independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to
Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (from thence onto Europe). It
was meant to sabotage the larger energy plans of both Russia and Iran.
AMBO itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to a terminal in the
former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then transport it by tanker
through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another
pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of Vlora.

As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that
Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would
be the largest overseas base the US had built since the Vietnam War.
Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root would, with the Army Corps
of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of farmland near the Macedonian
border in southern Kosovo.

Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with
perks for those stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of
junk food. Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile
aircraft carrier, capable of exercising surveillance not only over the
Balkans but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region (considered in the
neo-con-speak of the Bush years "the new interface" between the
"Euro-Atlantic community" and the "Greater Middle East").

How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then
the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to
pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of another of those
avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by the invasion of Iraq
(that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the recent clash in
Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction) as straightforward
wars for Pipelineistan?

Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and
Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from
Bill Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's "global war on
terror". Blowback, as then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself
warned publicly, was inevitable - but that's another magic-carpet story,
another cave to enter another time.

Rainy night in Georgia

If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you
have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in
its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's
energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine arc of instability -
in part because of a continuing obsession with cutting Iran out of the
energy flow.

It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed out in
my book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig
Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant",
less than four years after Azerbaijan became independent, and sold the
idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from the Sangachal
Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the
Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.

Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent
straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or potential:
Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and
Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia
(on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and Turkish Kurdistan.

>From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK"
pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could
have been built for, relatively speaking, next to nothing - and it would
have had the added advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia
and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia. That would have been the
really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to Europe.

The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed
from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia
long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs
through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin
pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting off the BTC oil flow,
Russian troops made it all too clear to global investors that Georgia
wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In other words, the Russians
made a mockery of Zbig's world.

For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in
the US version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton literally
"stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by promoting the BTC and the
wealth that would flow from it. Now, however, with the message of the
Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku is again allowing itself to be
seduced by Russia. To top it off, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev
can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly
surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military moves caused
Azerbaijan to lose at least $500 million when the BTC was shut down
during the war.

Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on Central
Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next Pipelineistan
installment.) It revolves around offering to buy Kazakh, Uzbek, and
Turkmen gas at European prices instead of previous, much lower Russian
prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same deal to the Azeris:
so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more capacity for the
Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to the Russian borders
of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less oil for the BTC.

Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri oil
on the BTC - its full capacity is one million barrels a day, mostly
shipped to Europe - means the pipeline may go broke, which is exactly
what Russia wants.

In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the monster
Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute jewel in
the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as nine billion barrels. As
usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to which routes will deliver
Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in 2013. This
spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President Nursultan
Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline
Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.

In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from
Kashagan will decide whether the BTC - once hyped by Washington as the
ultimate Western escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil -
lives or dies.

Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good
times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline
tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye
out for what happens to all those US bases across the oil heartlands of
the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built, and do your best
to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy deals and
fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.

And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent off
from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a quote
from Terminator). Think of this as a door opening onto a future in which
what flows where and to whom may turn out to be the most important
question on the planet.

_____

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times Online and an
analyst for the Real News. This article draws from his new book, Obama
does Globalistan. He is also the author of Globalistan: How the
Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and
Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (2007). Pepe may
be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com.

Copyright 2009 Pepe Escobar.

Used by permission Tomdispatch

All material on this website is copyright and may not be republished in
any form without written permission.
(c) Copyright 1999 - 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings), Ltd.
Head Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong
Thailand Bureau: 11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan,
Thailand 77110

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KC26Ag01.html


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/